Meet The Species Eugenioides, Coffee's Weird Delicious Uncle

For now, Eugenioides remains a relatively rare bird, though Merizalde and Watts both have high hopes for its future. It’s an extraordinary story for a coffee Merizalde and the Holguins essentially rescued from the dumpster of a genetics lab. The beguiling coffee—which incidentally has about half the caffeine content of your average Arabica bean—is, unfortunately, rather hard to grow. For one, it’s a smaller plant than Arabica. And it fruits less. And the beans are smaller. The childhood friends and farmers have had some better luck by greenhousing 5,000 Eugenioides plants on Finca Inmaculada, which are now a little over three years old. (For perspective, even greenhoused, these trees still produce only about 320 grams of green coffee per tree per year.)